The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,136

a couple pairs of handcuffs in the gear we took from Teglerstrasse. Get me one.”

Sara stepped toward the car.

Saltwood remembered her doing that. She was still standing a few feet from him, her hand on the car door, moments—but how many moments?—later, when he realized that Rhion Sligo was gone.

Stunned—more than stunned—he shook his head. He hadn’t—he COULDN’T have—fallen asleep on his feet.

He looked down at his hands. He still held the gun, but the map of the area he’d shoved into his pants pocket was gone.

Sara whispered, “Mah nishtanna,” and staggered. Saltwood sprang to steady her. She pushed him away in swift revulsion. “All right already, I’m fine...” In the reflected glare of the headlights she was white. “What the hell did he do? He was just standing there one second...”

In the long weeds of the road bank, Rhion’s track was starkly clear where he’d waded through the powder of glittering dew.

“He has the Spiracle,” Leibnitz voice said, deep and quiet, out of the darkness. “He can do pretty much whatever he can conjure up the strength within him to do—whatever he dares do.” In the starlight his white hair and beard glittered as if they, like the grass, were touched with frost, his eyes, pits of shadow under the long jut of brows. “I only hope—and you should hope, too, Captain Saltwood—that he makes it back to those stones okay, and that his friends really do pick him up at midnight tomorrow night.” His breath was steam as he spoke, his long hands, wrapped around his arms, colorless as a mummy’s against the gray cloth.

“Because if he doesn’t—if Paul von Rath gets his hands on that Spiracle again—I’m telling you now the Nazis invading England are going to be the least of everybody’s problems.”

“Goddam crazy little bastard.” Saltwood eased the car through the long weeds, overgrown branches of elder and hawthorn slapping wetly against the windscreen, wishing to hell he dared uncover the headlights enough to get a good view of the potholes of the farm track that led back to the main road. But the risk of being stopped was great enough without tampering with blackout regulations, and without Rhion and the Spiracle—whatever it really was—there was little chance a questioner wouldn’t notice the bulletholes in Saltwood’s uniform jacket, the pile of gear in the backseat, his lack of true resemblance to any of the various i.d. papers he carried, or the startling similarity of all the car’s passengers to the descriptions of fugitives undoubtedly being circulated by this time to every corner of the Third Reich.

In addition to the map it rapidly became clear that Rhion seemed to have taken a third of their money and food, and assorted ration books and identity papers, as well. Those last had been stowed in the car. Thinking about that made the hair creep on Saltwood’s scalp. How the hell long had he been standing there, gun pointing at nothing, unaware of anything taking place around him?

“Where the hell did they dig him out of?”

“I been trying to figure that out for months.” Sara pulled her knees up under a second field jacket she’d put over them like a blanket, and huddled tighter into the one over her shoulders. Her father, on her other side, still sat ramrod-straight and shivering in his shirts sleeves, his dark gaze turned worriedly out into the frost and blackness of the night.

“My guess,” she went on slowly, “is that who he thinks he is is based on some kind of distorted reality, though it’s hard to tell what that originally was. And he believes in it one hundred percent himself.”

Saltwood glanced curiously sidelong at her as the car emerged onto the Rathenow road. Instead of turning left, which would have taken them eventually to the Elbe and thence to the Hamburg autobahn, he turned right, eyes straining in the darkness for the crossroad where he’d turn off toward Brandenburg and then swing south of Berlin and head east. Thank God the Germans can’t stand anything that isn’t neatly labeled. He recalled only too clearly trying to get around in London after its inhabitants—expecting an invasion any hour—had taken down every street and road sign in the city, not that London was ever over-supplied with such things.

“So he told you?”

She nodded and brushed back a tendril of the dark hair which framed her face. “Three, four days after they took us prisoner last June, that bodyguard of his, Horst Eisler, showed up at Kegenwald